DDR-400 Memory Battle - Crucial vs. Geil vs. Mushkin

Today we are comparing DDR-400 enthusiast memory modules from Crucial, Geil and Mushkin which are designed for performance AMD Athlon 64 users. After taking a look at each module and checking their compatibility on a range of DDR based chipsets, we run a bunch of benchmarks to work out which module offers the best performance.

Memory technology in computers is one that has not changed in terms of a technology standpoint for about 10 years now. While we are looking at memory that is over 10 times faster, we are still dealing with technology based on Synchronous Dynamic RAM.

DDR SDRAM, while not the latest in technology compared to DDR-2, it is the still the most widely used memory thanks to Intel's I865 series chipsets and AMD Athlon 64 based processors - these are the two biggest reasons DDR has become such a big thing and still is to this day.

DDR, as many know was the first evolution jump in SDRAM technology, using both the rising and falling edges of the clock cycles, data was able to transmit 2x per clock cycle instead of 1x. This lead to a doubling of the overall bandwidth, which has benefited the Intel Pentium 4 in Dual Channel setups after the debunking of RDRAM as the memory of choice many years ago now.

Today AMD Athlon 64 is the biggest user of DDR technology and as we have seen, the lower the latencies, the more the AMD64 platform thrives. Today we have three new dual channel kits into the test labs, all DDR-400 modules designed for the AMD64 platform.

Today we compare three different enthusiast modules from Crucial, Geil and Mushkin - how will they perform? Let's take a look and see.